Silksong's Twisted Child ending
Jan. 9th, 2026 04:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
requiemsDocumenting one of the hardest things a game has ever asked of me, which is to beat the final boss of the game without healing and basically hitless. I had to run this one fight a lot and learned a lot of the boss' specific quirks, so I have plenty to say about it.
This is fairly straightforward if you know what to do. You go to poison swamp and find a crying baby root. Fun fact: this baby root cries every time you open your inventory, and continues to cry no matter what page you are on, so I did not pick up baby root until I was about to start the quest it's involved in. You take the baby root to a bigger root, who then puts the parasite baby into Hornet's shell. This swaps out your crest and restricts you from changing it until you go find a cure for yourself.
But you can also go fight Grand Mother Silk whilst cursed for a unique ending and achievement first if you're a masochist.
If you're a completionist, by the end of Act 2 the map have been scoured and you'll have every tool and bit of gear to make your experience in Silksong more breezy. My favourite crest is Wanderer's: it's fast, it allows two needle hits for every one, and the speed of your attacks means you can facetank and parry rather efficiently by this point in the game if paired with silk regeneration on hit and higher heal values, which led to me beating a few bosses first try when I was still learning mechanics. I know how to make the most of my movement, and how to dodge, but I'm not the most careful, if that makes sense; I get clipped by bosses a lot when being aggressive, particularly against those with deceptive hitbox sizes, so I accommodate that. I have very poor depth perception, and memorise distances instead, which doesn't work as well against things that are not static.
Cursed crest is a standard speed attack with a standard sweep and fortunately a pogo that is very similar to Wanderer's, which is in turn the same as it was in Hollow Knight, but realistically speaking you won't be pogoing during Grand Mother Silk at all so that doesn't really matter.
You also lose:
• all silk skills, which I never use anyway (I find them unintuitive, I have enough on my plate manoeuvring myself and dodging and attacking than having to position myself based on whatever silk skill I pick. Plus it uses healing resource)
• healing, which means you can be hit 3-4 times maximum: more on that later
• red tools, these use shard resource. I typically only use spikes or cogflies but oftentimes I likewise won't use them at all unless it's to solve a specific problem, such as ads or last phase throw everything out so the boss dies, etc
• blue tools, these are all your little buffs and perks that you can adjust to compliment your playstyle. I use fractured mask which gives you a safety net on your last point of health, injector band which means you heal faster, multibinder which changes your heal to two lots of two, and druid's eyes that gives you silk back for when you get hit because I expect to get hit. My strategy is to heal. You cannot heal in this fight at all
• yellow tools are primarily exploratory but there's also lucky dice which gives you a low chance of not taking damage from a hit, which is just nice to have
Cursed crest takes you back to how you were at the beginning of the game and equipmentless, with a few exceptions. You have all your health. You still have your needle upgrades (+3, 17 damage per hit), you can still double jump, float, dash across the floor, dash and then tumble in mid air, and use the needle in midair to grapple horizontally a set distance.
Unfortunately, you should not be using most of these. Clawline, the grapple, is risky to use and not worth it because of the way it interacts with the rules of GMS' mechanics. You should never run to her but simply walk, and you don't have to double jump, and the only time you'll be using float is during her silk web mechanic where silk lines spread out across the screen and you're forced into a position that isn't on the floor depending on where the rng calls the safe spot, and one other mechanic that's not necessary and purely because it made the second part of it easier to see for me due to poor depth perception. But even then I still had to get back on the floor fast.
The midair tumble is likewise optional, but I use it for horizontal nails because it makes it easier for me to successfully dodge the mechanic in her opening phases in rhythm, and has the added effect of getting you away from the follow-up vertical nails... most of the time.
You also have your needle art, which is a charged standard attack, and honestly, earnestly speaking... I have never used these in either Silksong or Hollow Knight. It's very clunky to use on a controller, as you have to press the attack button and then keep hold of it and then release it. I don't have the fingers for this, and could probably get multiple more hits in in the time I've held the button down.
Besting this fight took me five hours of game time - the longest of anything in either Hollow Knight or Silksong, because it's brutally merciless.
Grand Mother Silk is almost perfectly a match to Radiance's fight. She has no collision hitbox, she uses vertical and horizontal nails swipes in predictive, no change to speed patterns (except this time I could see them because they weren't the same colour as the background), and in later phases she summons spikes on the floor that you can get rid of by hitting them a couple of times. I also turned off the music as, like Radiance and my inability to see, I knew this would help me so much with reacting to the unique audio cues for every attack... if it wasn't for having to suffer many hours through Radiance, I absolutely would have not defeated her normally first try, because I saw the nails come in and instinctively remembered what I needed to do and how I needed to do it.
This was something of a trap, because I hadn't learned the fight. At all. Like I said, I facetanked it and recognised familiar mechanics enough to get silk to heal when I needed to and it didn't matter if I made a mistake or rng was mean and out of my favour, I could heal up and keep going. When going for the Twisted Child ending, the maximum hp you can have is nine. All incoming damage takes two, so four hits - except for her silk webs, which do three. So safely speaking, you can afford to be hit in this fight a grand total of twice. You have to do every mechanic perfectly, for five minutes or more, and hit her approximately seventy two times, and have the patience and tenacity to wait out periods of time when you can't damage her at all, but having to keep perfectly dodging. I can do hundreds of perfect jumps. I did time trials in the OG Crash Bandicoot, remember. First try to five hours over three days is steep. I was learning, but progress was slow.
GMS has two distinct phases, but six total. Second phase, about a hundred damage in she adds silk webs. She then screams, which cancels all ongoing mechanics to prioritise, and somewhere around this point she'll stagger, which again cancels all ongoing mechanics. Her fourth phase is her faking her defeat and debris begins to fall onto the platform, which is the shift. Eventually she'll summon spike traps which you can get rid of - and have a long downtime after she summons them for you to do so, a great time to get a few attacks on her in and reposition - and sometime after this she'll stagger again. Lastly, she screams one final time and that's the signal that you're approximately twenty hits away from victory.
Getting into the second part of the fight was the toughest part, imo. The second is easier because you get breaks. But is is an endurance test to make it to the second part of the fight with enough health to see you through to the end. At first I couldn't make it to second. I made it, and eventually made it again, but my rate was still say, 1/6. I would get through the opening to die to something unexpected or a mechanical quirk I didn't know to account for yet out of the gate, and then I would have to do the whole first part again just so I could get close enough to practice the second... truly, Radiance in every way... I did some practice whilst talking to my duo whilst OW servers kicked the bucket and I didn't expect to clear whilst also talking, but as I was able to get through the mechanics of the first part of the fight reasonably without full concentration to make it to second, it showed to me the repetition was paying off.
And it was infuriating, because the couple of times I did make it to second with six or seven health, I was making it to traps, nearing the last scream, it was definitely doable. I just needed rng to not fuck me over, because that was usually the problem. Like, I could accept something as a skill check if it wasn't the game giving me no safe spot so I had to take the hit, or mechanics behaving oddly out of certain conditions. It wasn't my practiced errors, it was stuff I couldn't account for. I had to make little caveats in my head of things to specifically watch out for after certain attacks to deal with these inconsistencies.
• silk web trap I went through a period of pausing to try to get more than a split second to determine a safe spot, since you can't move very far. This would work, sort of, but if the spot wasn't on the floor or required you to float out of pause it would foil you more often than not so I went back to blind prayer. This one definitely was down to chance, and sometimes a pixel of Hornet would be over the line. Ideally rng will bless you with a place to stand on the ground, or a clear jump and float location without having to madly reposition for the second, but it just, sucks. It's not something you can account for and is probably going to be the source of those two hits you can take.
• nails follow a certain rhythm. There's a set timing to first, second, then later first second third. GMS spaces them out and doesn't use them on top of one another so you have a clear dodge window... so long as you always walk to her and don't use clawline. These things you can effect. If she moves to a spot and doesn't have the space to spread both vertical and horizontal nails due to overlap, she'll only do one. Unless she uses them immediately out of a stagger, or after the shift into the second part of the fight. If she staggers she just throws them all out in one spot and if there's a third, it's slower to fire. If it's right out of falling debris, the timing is completely off if she does it in centre (sides are fine. Why? WHO KNOWS.) you also can't always see the safe spot because she summons them behind debris, just for this one cast. The number of times I would go into second and die from jumping one attack into the next was horrendous
• when she raises her hand to strike with the claw, this is the attack I float on, because she also throws vertical nails and it makes it easier to line myself up with the gaps in the air than to try to read it on the ground and get hit. But you have to get back on the ground asap, because any unwarranted time in the air that isn't a single jump makes her horizontal nails change rules. If you're on the ground it's either a little jump or a bigger jump to clear them - in the air the gap is on the floor. If she immediately goes into horizontal nails after claw, even if you immediately get on the ground and have had enough time to walk around a bit, the game will still consider you as having been in the air for her cast, so I had to make a mental note on this one too
• I also saw her do four sets of nails in a row once and I have no idea what prompted this. Girl you work in THREES
I kept going. I made it to the final scream. I died not soon after. I climbed the damn tower and went AGAIN. And again, and again.
I would do this fight in forty minute chunks, because my reflexes would begin to go and I wouldn't be able to the first stage of jumping the horizontal nails anymore (I can't describe how I know when to jump through a moving gap, it's instinct). All those close failures were devastating because it could take half a dozen times to end up back in the ideal scenario of having enough health and rng luck to do it again. I kept persevering, I kept my quirks in mind, and I saw her final scream again and I was so close. I had to be so patient, I had one health left, it was her or me, just be patient and wait for your openings, don't rush it, don't cave under the pressure of knowing it's almost done, don't--
And then I finally did it. Freaking hell.
The thing is once I had cured myself of the cursed baby, you have to fight GMS again to go into act 3. Which after all that practice, I did the first stage cleanly, and would have probably made it to the end of the second without having to heal if not for the rng of silk threads being the cause of my eternal suffering so I had to, lol.
But yeah. Would I do this again? For one fight of reasonable simplicity, maybe. It works on GMS, because she is solely mechanics based as she has no collision, with most other bosses it would just suck. This post is a bit delayed for me having to expand on it from my notes, so I've done all of Act 3 in the interim. Tomorrow I face the true final boss of the game. I've always been terrified of it, it's hard as hell: but if I can beat GMS without being able to heal, I can definitely do it.
See you on the other side.
Getting cursed
This is fairly straightforward if you know what to do. You go to poison swamp and find a crying baby root. Fun fact: this baby root cries every time you open your inventory, and continues to cry no matter what page you are on, so I did not pick up baby root until I was about to start the quest it's involved in. You take the baby root to a bigger root, who then puts the parasite baby into Hornet's shell. This swaps out your crest and restricts you from changing it until you go find a cure for yourself.
But you can also go fight Grand Mother Silk whilst cursed for a unique ending and achievement first if you're a masochist.
What you lose access to
If you're a completionist, by the end of Act 2 the map have been scoured and you'll have every tool and bit of gear to make your experience in Silksong more breezy. My favourite crest is Wanderer's: it's fast, it allows two needle hits for every one, and the speed of your attacks means you can facetank and parry rather efficiently by this point in the game if paired with silk regeneration on hit and higher heal values, which led to me beating a few bosses first try when I was still learning mechanics. I know how to make the most of my movement, and how to dodge, but I'm not the most careful, if that makes sense; I get clipped by bosses a lot when being aggressive, particularly against those with deceptive hitbox sizes, so I accommodate that. I have very poor depth perception, and memorise distances instead, which doesn't work as well against things that are not static.
Cursed crest is a standard speed attack with a standard sweep and fortunately a pogo that is very similar to Wanderer's, which is in turn the same as it was in Hollow Knight, but realistically speaking you won't be pogoing during Grand Mother Silk at all so that doesn't really matter.
You also lose:
• all silk skills, which I never use anyway (I find them unintuitive, I have enough on my plate manoeuvring myself and dodging and attacking than having to position myself based on whatever silk skill I pick. Plus it uses healing resource)
• healing, which means you can be hit 3-4 times maximum: more on that later
• red tools, these use shard resource. I typically only use spikes or cogflies but oftentimes I likewise won't use them at all unless it's to solve a specific problem, such as ads or last phase throw everything out so the boss dies, etc
• blue tools, these are all your little buffs and perks that you can adjust to compliment your playstyle. I use fractured mask which gives you a safety net on your last point of health, injector band which means you heal faster, multibinder which changes your heal to two lots of two, and druid's eyes that gives you silk back for when you get hit because I expect to get hit. My strategy is to heal. You cannot heal in this fight at all
• yellow tools are primarily exploratory but there's also lucky dice which gives you a low chance of not taking damage from a hit, which is just nice to have
What you still have to work with
Cursed crest takes you back to how you were at the beginning of the game and equipmentless, with a few exceptions. You have all your health. You still have your needle upgrades (+3, 17 damage per hit), you can still double jump, float, dash across the floor, dash and then tumble in mid air, and use the needle in midair to grapple horizontally a set distance.
Unfortunately, you should not be using most of these. Clawline, the grapple, is risky to use and not worth it because of the way it interacts with the rules of GMS' mechanics. You should never run to her but simply walk, and you don't have to double jump, and the only time you'll be using float is during her silk web mechanic where silk lines spread out across the screen and you're forced into a position that isn't on the floor depending on where the rng calls the safe spot, and one other mechanic that's not necessary and purely because it made the second part of it easier to see for me due to poor depth perception. But even then I still had to get back on the floor fast.
The midair tumble is likewise optional, but I use it for horizontal nails because it makes it easier for me to successfully dodge the mechanic in her opening phases in rhythm, and has the added effect of getting you away from the follow-up vertical nails... most of the time.
You also have your needle art, which is a charged standard attack, and honestly, earnestly speaking... I have never used these in either Silksong or Hollow Knight. It's very clunky to use on a controller, as you have to press the attack button and then keep hold of it and then release it. I don't have the fingers for this, and could probably get multiple more hits in in the time I've held the button down.
The fight
Besting this fight took me five hours of game time - the longest of anything in either Hollow Knight or Silksong, because it's brutally merciless.
Grand Mother Silk is almost perfectly a match to Radiance's fight. She has no collision hitbox, she uses vertical and horizontal nails swipes in predictive, no change to speed patterns (except this time I could see them because they weren't the same colour as the background), and in later phases she summons spikes on the floor that you can get rid of by hitting them a couple of times. I also turned off the music as, like Radiance and my inability to see, I knew this would help me so much with reacting to the unique audio cues for every attack... if it wasn't for having to suffer many hours through Radiance, I absolutely would have not defeated her normally first try, because I saw the nails come in and instinctively remembered what I needed to do and how I needed to do it.
This was something of a trap, because I hadn't learned the fight. At all. Like I said, I facetanked it and recognised familiar mechanics enough to get silk to heal when I needed to and it didn't matter if I made a mistake or rng was mean and out of my favour, I could heal up and keep going. When going for the Twisted Child ending, the maximum hp you can have is nine. All incoming damage takes two, so four hits - except for her silk webs, which do three. So safely speaking, you can afford to be hit in this fight a grand total of twice. You have to do every mechanic perfectly, for five minutes or more, and hit her approximately seventy two times, and have the patience and tenacity to wait out periods of time when you can't damage her at all, but having to keep perfectly dodging. I can do hundreds of perfect jumps. I did time trials in the OG Crash Bandicoot, remember. First try to five hours over three days is steep. I was learning, but progress was slow.
GMS has two distinct phases, but six total. Second phase, about a hundred damage in she adds silk webs. She then screams, which cancels all ongoing mechanics to prioritise, and somewhere around this point she'll stagger, which again cancels all ongoing mechanics. Her fourth phase is her faking her defeat and debris begins to fall onto the platform, which is the shift. Eventually she'll summon spike traps which you can get rid of - and have a long downtime after she summons them for you to do so, a great time to get a few attacks on her in and reposition - and sometime after this she'll stagger again. Lastly, she screams one final time and that's the signal that you're approximately twenty hits away from victory.
Getting into the second part of the fight was the toughest part, imo. The second is easier because you get breaks. But is is an endurance test to make it to the second part of the fight with enough health to see you through to the end. At first I couldn't make it to second. I made it, and eventually made it again, but my rate was still say, 1/6. I would get through the opening to die to something unexpected or a mechanical quirk I didn't know to account for yet out of the gate, and then I would have to do the whole first part again just so I could get close enough to practice the second... truly, Radiance in every way... I did some practice whilst talking to my duo whilst OW servers kicked the bucket and I didn't expect to clear whilst also talking, but as I was able to get through the mechanics of the first part of the fight reasonably without full concentration to make it to second, it showed to me the repetition was paying off.
And it was infuriating, because the couple of times I did make it to second with six or seven health, I was making it to traps, nearing the last scream, it was definitely doable. I just needed rng to not fuck me over, because that was usually the problem. Like, I could accept something as a skill check if it wasn't the game giving me no safe spot so I had to take the hit, or mechanics behaving oddly out of certain conditions. It wasn't my practiced errors, it was stuff I couldn't account for. I had to make little caveats in my head of things to specifically watch out for after certain attacks to deal with these inconsistencies.
• silk web trap I went through a period of pausing to try to get more than a split second to determine a safe spot, since you can't move very far. This would work, sort of, but if the spot wasn't on the floor or required you to float out of pause it would foil you more often than not so I went back to blind prayer. This one definitely was down to chance, and sometimes a pixel of Hornet would be over the line. Ideally rng will bless you with a place to stand on the ground, or a clear jump and float location without having to madly reposition for the second, but it just, sucks. It's not something you can account for and is probably going to be the source of those two hits you can take.
• nails follow a certain rhythm. There's a set timing to first, second, then later first second third. GMS spaces them out and doesn't use them on top of one another so you have a clear dodge window... so long as you always walk to her and don't use clawline. These things you can effect. If she moves to a spot and doesn't have the space to spread both vertical and horizontal nails due to overlap, she'll only do one. Unless she uses them immediately out of a stagger, or after the shift into the second part of the fight. If she staggers she just throws them all out in one spot and if there's a third, it's slower to fire. If it's right out of falling debris, the timing is completely off if she does it in centre (sides are fine. Why? WHO KNOWS.) you also can't always see the safe spot because she summons them behind debris, just for this one cast. The number of times I would go into second and die from jumping one attack into the next was horrendous
• when she raises her hand to strike with the claw, this is the attack I float on, because she also throws vertical nails and it makes it easier to line myself up with the gaps in the air than to try to read it on the ground and get hit. But you have to get back on the ground asap, because any unwarranted time in the air that isn't a single jump makes her horizontal nails change rules. If you're on the ground it's either a little jump or a bigger jump to clear them - in the air the gap is on the floor. If she immediately goes into horizontal nails after claw, even if you immediately get on the ground and have had enough time to walk around a bit, the game will still consider you as having been in the air for her cast, so I had to make a mental note on this one too
• I also saw her do four sets of nails in a row once and I have no idea what prompted this. Girl you work in THREES
I kept going. I made it to the final scream. I died not soon after. I climbed the damn tower and went AGAIN. And again, and again.
I would do this fight in forty minute chunks, because my reflexes would begin to go and I wouldn't be able to the first stage of jumping the horizontal nails anymore (I can't describe how I know when to jump through a moving gap, it's instinct). All those close failures were devastating because it could take half a dozen times to end up back in the ideal scenario of having enough health and rng luck to do it again. I kept persevering, I kept my quirks in mind, and I saw her final scream again and I was so close. I had to be so patient, I had one health left, it was her or me, just be patient and wait for your openings, don't rush it, don't cave under the pressure of knowing it's almost done, don't--
And then I finally did it. Freaking hell.
The thing is once I had cured myself of the cursed baby, you have to fight GMS again to go into act 3. Which after all that practice, I did the first stage cleanly, and would have probably made it to the end of the second without having to heal if not for the rng of silk threads being the cause of my eternal suffering so I had to, lol.
But yeah. Would I do this again? For one fight of reasonable simplicity, maybe. It works on GMS, because she is solely mechanics based as she has no collision, with most other bosses it would just suck. This post is a bit delayed for me having to expand on it from my notes, so I've done all of Act 3 in the interim. Tomorrow I face the true final boss of the game. I've always been terrified of it, it's hard as hell: but if I can beat GMS without being able to heal, I can definitely do it.
See you on the other side.
